Lakeland PBS presents Common Ground brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Production funding of Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji.

Continuing their second century of service to the community.

Member FDIC Welcome to Common Ground.

I'm producer director Scott Knudson.

In this first episode of a two-part series we go inside the Bemidji Area Cross-Country Ski Club.

Is your husband out here too?

Yeah go dead.

Involvement in nordic skiing I think is just individuals that are passionate about being outside.

I mean living in northern Minnesota winter's a long time just to sit indoors.

Being outside and just being challenged by the terrain, being awespired by, you know the beauty of the surrounding systems that we have.

You know skiing around the river system at Three Island just being out there alone, classical skiing with the snow falling.

iI's a good feeling.

I mean I love to think of Nordic Skiing as a lifelong sport.

I always say if I can still walk I know I can still ski.

It's a sport that I think people get involved in to be outdoors.

They like to challenge themselves.

It's good clean exercise and it's something you can do for a long time in your life.

Bemidji is certainly recognized statewide as one of the hotbeds of Nordic Skiing and it draws a lot of folks up here to ski which supports the tourism economy and then just providing folks the opportunity to learn and enjoy cross-country skiing.

There is a little bit of an initial investment but once you have the equipment, basically you can just hop in your car, you know, go to one of the sites and you can just ski and so many people really do just like to ski on their own but it's a great social thing too.

I mean you're outside.

It's fresh air.

You can enjoy the scenery together.

Cross-country skiing is often noted as the top aerobic activity because you're moving your feet and your arms and training for cross-country skiing can be a heck of a workout.

We're kind of the forgotten sport you know.

We're out in the woods.

We're not a good spectator sport and skiers bond because we share different things.

We share a love of skiing or we share that we did it in the cold or we share that we skied this long marathon and we were dying you know.

So, I think that's part of the culture of cross-country skiing is that we're we're sort of the I feel like a little bit of the underdogs.

So, we're always working hard to get money and funds to do this and that.

We're not flush with money but we've done super well with what we have.

So, this is a snow journey first this is the first time there's been a person at the feed stage at the water station.

Yeah, thank you, thanks for the media.

So, I'm Bruce Slinkman.

I'm a Bemidji lifelong resident and I got involved in cross-country skiing I think it was 1975 when my parents bought our whole family brother and sister mom and dad ,a set of cross-country skis from The Home Place.

In the early 90's I joined the Minnesota Finlandia board as a board member and started to get involved with that organization.

So I eventually moved through the rank so to speak and became the race director for the Finlandia for a number of years.

Became the president of the board of Finlandia in that same time period.

In the early 90's I was one of the founding members of the state country ski organization called MINSA - Minnesota Nordic Ski Association.

So, I've been involved in that organization.

It started in 2001.

So pushing on 20 years.

My name is Mur Gilman and I'm a member of the Bemidji Area Cross Country Ski Club.

I'm a past president of the club and a past president of the Minnesota Finlandia.

Skiing's been a big part of my life but in my professional career I was a professor at BSU for 37 years and I was particularly involved in Exercise Science and Exercise Physiology.

I coached the BSU varsity cross country ski teams for six years and I love to ski.

The Bemidji Ski Club and it's been in existence since the late 80s, it's the organization that provides the trails, the grooming of the trails, sponsorship of events, supportive events and it's involved with sponsoring the Sunday Ski School.

Well the club originally was founded in its current form in around 1989-90 for the purpose of grooming trails because prior to that we were all skiing but we had really spotty ski grooming.

So, we could get a beautiful snow and it might be two weeks before the Movil Maze was groomed and we all put up with it but it was really nice when the club was formed and they started to get Grant In Aid money and groom trails on a regular basis.

The basis of the ski club is trails.

So if we didn't have the trails here the great trails we do in the Bemidji area, there wouldn't be the ability to have groomed ski trails and there really wouldn't be a ski club.

So the number one activity that the ski club does is the grooming of the ski trails.

I think that's really added to the growth of cross-country skiing and especially the last few years.

The trails are groomed regularly and people know that if they go to the Movil Maze for example, they're going to have a nice trail.

I arrived in Bemidji in 1975 and there were two clubs.

There was a competition club and there was a touring club.

So, the competition club were interested in racing and the touring club those members were just interested in going out and enjoying the woods and being on their skis.

I don't know exactly how those clubs were founded at that time and that would have been probably around 1970 but some of the primary people that were involved in that were Ken Jorgensen and Wally Sande who wrote to the Norwegian Birkebeiner and asked them for the use of the name Birkebeiner and so once we started having events like that, that got more people involved in skiing.

An agency that was critical was the Bemidji Outdoor Program Center and they actually had a person who was in charge of the competition club.

At one point it was Bill Weller, Larry Gullingsrude, Joyce Miller Idem, and so those were some of the people who made a difference.

There were also things going on like The Home Place was a resort down near Walker and they had a set of ski trails that people were driving from Bemidji to ski on.

It was one of the first trail systems in the state in the early 70's.

Well, they decided since they were selling skis out of their resort that they should move their ski business to Bemidji and Joyce came to town one day and bought the current Home Place building and they opened a shop.

So, that gave people a place where they could go to get advice to buy good equipment.

I'm sure there's a number of people who've hung out at the Home Place because it gave them someone to talk to and they could talk to other skiers.

Getting grooming reports, what trails have been groomed, people just kind of gathering, check on things to buy equipment.

So, The Home Place has been kind of the grand central station over the years for nordic skiing in Bemidji and following the Tibstra's retirement, there was a number of years where the shop was not there but the Ahrens family, John Ahrens and his son Devin acquired the the building and now run the business so it's really cool that The Home Place is up and running full speed right now.

The beginning of the Bemidji Area Cross Country Ski Club, as we know it today, was probably begun by Bob Montebello, Julie Love, and Vicki Brown.

I think that they were critical in developing Bylaws, getting us organized, and then we've gone from there and that allowed us to apply for grant and aid money, and then we always had a source of revenue, and so it's been rolling along.

I'm Bob Montebello, and I think the first time I heard anything about cross-country skiing was when my office partner there at BSU said they were going to hire a gal who was pretty good at cross-country skiing and they were bringing her in to implement a Cross-Country Ski program because up to that point, Downhill Skiing was the only skiing we did in this area.

The next thing I know, this gal is running by my office and oh, that's the one that they just hired and it happened to be Muriel Gilman.

I didn't know a thing about cross-country skiing at that point and then all of a sudden there was some talk about the Finlandia Organization coming in and running races and that took center stage for quite a while.

I got involved with doing something for the Finlandia program, driving bus for them, busing skiers from downtown Bemidji up to BV and then from BV back downtown after the races were over.

Well, the best I could recall as far as the formation of the Bemidji Area Cross Country Ski Club, I think it was Muriel Gilman that said there's going to be a meeting of people interested in re-doing a ski club in Bemidji, because the people that had started a ski-touring club disbanded.

I think Muriel said there's going to be a meeting at the high school and if you want to go, it's going to be in such and such at such and such a time, There were 7 or 8 of us there that met and we said, "well what should we call ourselves?"

This other outfit was called the Ski-touring Club and I don't know, I said, "well, or somebody did, let's call ourselves The Bemidji Area Cross-country Ski Club, so we include more than just Bemidji, the City of Bemidji, but something that's more, encompasses all of our area.

So that's what we called it, and from there, we just decided, "well, we got the President, we got a Treasurer, we had a Trail Administrator already, he was a member of that- Dale Rude, and that's where it took off.

It's the simple little meeting.

This was a fairly early board, and by that time I had recruited Bob Montebello to be on the board and he was a baseball coach at BSU, so a lot of people wonder how he got into skiing.

Well, he was occasionally skiing with his family but I got him to be on the board, and that was a real winner because then he went on to do all these things for cross-country skiing in the community.

He is a forward-thinking guy with lots of connections in the community and he was so instrumental in cross-country skiing in our community through his hard work but also very involved in the community and had the ability to recruit other people and get them involved in grooming, and he was a very good grant writer and so he was one of the key people to bring us a lot of the grant money that we've used for buying equipment.

We were hiring out our grooming to the snowmobile club and the only trail that basically the ski club would be grooming would be The Movil Maze area, but basically, the need that we saw was we wanted better groomed trails.

If we wanted or needed them, and we wanted them groomed when we wanted them, we'd have to have our own equipment and we would need to do it.

That's kind of where we started writing grants to get equipment and we got help, people interested in running a snowmobile, and by and large we were grooming at night a number of the times because that's when we could get people together to groom.

We were all working at that time during the day.

So Bob Montebello has a very unique role in the Bemidji ski club, he was pretty much the initial trail administrator, so his role was to oversee the grooming activities, including trail clearing, for the ski club, for like a couple decades.

My research, a couple years ago, led me to find out, or discover, that Bob is the oldest active groomer in North America, even in Canada and in the United States.

He was in his early 90s and he was still grooming.

He's scaled back from that now, and so Bob's mentored many many groomers over the years.

I got started as a trail administrator because the person that had been kind of doing the job was a fully employed person in town and I think he was bogged down by a lot of the work.

We had trails that weren't quite getting done the way we'd like them, and so I offered to help him.

That was Dale Rude at the time, I believe was the first trail administrator for the ski club.

Well, Dale said, "well why don't you just do it and take it over?"

and he threw a bunch of papers at me and I was so befuddled by all of this, I couldn't figure out one head from the other but I finally figured out what was going on, and we had 3 different trails to administer at that point in time, Movil Maze, City trail, and the Hobson trail.

They had 3 different administrators, and I said "There's got to be some way we can pull all this together and get 1 trail report instead of 3.

I ventured to all 3 different places and asked them if they'd be willing to combine administration of the trails with the DNR.

Everybody seemed to be in favor of that, so we did, we managed to combine all 3 into 1 Trail Report for the DNR.

Boy, they were happy with that.

Basically, the trail administrator was just kind of an office job, trying to see that the trails do get cleared and groomed and reports sent in, so there was a fair amount of paperwork.

I've got reams of reports still on file that I am going to turn over to somebody, someday.

It was fun all the way, I enjoyed it because I always felt that when I was out cross-country skiing, after I picked up the sport, that somebody has to clear these trails and groom them so that they were fun to be used that way so maybe somebody I could replace or help, I always look at it as a "what's good for the skier?"

and "how can I make skiing better for the public?"

and particularly as we started grooming trails, and getting our whole trail set up here, we were getting a lot of people from all around town, and all over the state to come up here to ski because they had such good trails.

Yvonne Mckenzie, she was the person who had the skills to put together our newsletter and she was a graphics person at BSU and then Vicki Brown was a community member who loved cross country skiing and still is somewhat involved, she came to our Snowjourn this year, and she became our Executive Director when Kathy left.

It kind of fell apart when MN FIN came in, we lost a lot of energy that went into youth skiing and it went to the MN FIN, but in the 90's, the Community Ed had picked up cross-country skiing and had classes for people to take, and that was working out okay.

Charlie Parsons was one of the people who taught, along with his daughter, but by the mid 90's, we were needing to have more youth programming and so that's when we started our Sunday Ski School, so Sunday Ski School, as we know it today, came out of a meeting with Bruce Manske, Bill Grunde, myself, and probably Sue Tipstra.

We met in the Ottertail Power Community Room and talked about how we were going to offer this program and to make it affordable for kids in our community, then we've just gone from there.

Sue Tipstra was instrumental in the development of the program and in the culture of cross-country skiing in the Bemidji area, and that came from her work at their shop, The Home Place, and she helped to organize ski school and through her membership in the club, and her "forever" term as Treasurer on the Ski Club Board, she just had a way of organizing, she was a meticulous record keeper and was totally committed and very silently doing all of it.

Kind of the second thing that the ski club does that's really important, it does the instruction for cross-country skiing and that's done through the program the club has done for many many decades.

Its called Sunday Ski School, that's held all the Sundays through the month of January now, provides instruction for the little guys /gals, maybe Kindergarten up through the ranks, Middle school, leading into adults.

Sunday Ski School is run by all volunteers and it takes quite a few to work with each age group.

Sunday Ski School is a program offered by our Bemidji Area Cross-country Ski Club to encourage people to learn how to ski and we make it family-friendly and affordable.

When it first started, we just had kids, and we had kids from maybe 3 or 4 years old to teenagers, and then I had a few adults that were wanting to sit in on my older kids ski class and I said, "you know, we really need to include adults."

Now we have a full adult program where we teach skating and we teach classical skiing as well.

On Sundays when we gather for Sunday Ski School, we we meet in the cafeteria and the people who need skis can get their skis in the cafeteria and learn how to put the bindings on and how to hold the poles, and then we meet with our respective groups and we have groups that are anywhere from 10 to 20 people - maybe smaller, not bigger , and then we have volunteer teachers / instructors who work with their small group and I often do things inside, but then once we get a few movements down and language down and we all go outside and we're on snow.

The club grooms the fields as best they're allowed, and trails at the Middle School.

I thought it was a great idea to have that as a public service and everybody in our ski club supported it that I can recall.

I think Mur Gilman probably there was a big push there to get her involved in that, in teaching, and her knowledge of cross-country skiing was probably better than anyone else's around.

So Muriel Gilman has been a foundation of the ski club from the late 80's.

She was a very competitive racer, there was a period of time where BSU had a cross-country ski team, she was the coach of that, and so she's very very versed in teaching skiing.

She's been the lead instructor teaching other folks how to teach skiing, right, and teaching skiing has just been fundamental for the Bemidji Ski Club for decades.

I think just having that ski school made a lot of difference in our applying for grants for money from people in the community, especially The Nielsen Foundation.

I think they've considered that fact that we were doing something with our equipment money so there was a public good, and so I think the Ski School has been a tremendous help to the Ski Club and to our community.

The structure of the ski school allows people to try something that they haven't tried before.

We provide the equipment for them, so they don't have to rent or purchase equipment to give skiing a try and it's a way for them to learn a little bit of ins and outs, and we meet for 3 Sundays in a row and the kids go one more Sunday after that - so by the time that we're through with Sunday Ski School, we feel like our participants should have enough knowledge and skill to be able to go rent some skis if they want, or purchase some skis and then enjoy some skiing and do some practicing and get better at it.

It has a lot of health benefits and those are physiological.

I have to think that psychologically, for people who don't like winter skiing, is a great way to increase your breathing and your ventilation and to maybe help with some of that seasonal affective disorder.

Challenges that I faced as an instructor are - and it used to be that I had way too many students but I recruited a couple of nice guys that help me teach now and they do a great job, so I've overcome that, and that helps a lot with another challenge that I used to have, and that was that you'd have a person who'd never had skis on before, and you'd have a person who just wanted to get back into it but they already had some skills, and I've had relatively young adults, and by that I mean 20's and 30's and I've had 70 and 80 year olds and that's a challenge, because we do change as we get older and it makes it a little more difficult with flexibility and strength for an older person.

Of course we have weather.

We have cold weather sometimes; if we bundle up and we can find a place outside of the wind, and cold days in Minnesota winters are usually sunny days, so if we can get out of the wind and the sun warms us up and we're moving, we're okay.

The other challenge is the snow and the snow conditions.

It could be not enough snow, could be icy snow, could be fresh snow and soft tracks.

We don't always have perfect tracks and a perfect track to me is a hard packed but powdery snow that you can get a grip on and you can kick and glide.

I think that all young people should have an opportunity to learn a variety of sports and skills and some of them find out that it's really really fun, and hopefully all of them realize that there are lots of good ways to spend winter, and the ski club used to have a model that was something like "skiing makes winter fun," and I think that's true for young people and it's true for older people.

Thank you for watching.

In the next episode, join us for the conclusion of the Bemidji Area Cross Country Ski Club.

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Production funding of Common Ground was made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their 2nd century of service to the community.

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